Designing a Welding Program for Growth, Not Just Grades

At the start of my teaching career, I graded welds the way many welding instructors do — by the bucketful. At the end of each class period, I collected armloads of weld coupons, hauled them to my office, and spent hours sorting, evaluating, and entering scores in the gradebook. It was labor intensive, time consuming, and unsustainable, especially with large class sizes.

More importantly, that system wasn’t serving students well. Feedback was delayed, progress felt disconnected, and students were often more fo..